APPASSIONATA
He wakes to clouds fastened to the sky,
Something inside his head is keening like a lovelorn narwhal,
He shaves, everywhere,
Kneeling, his hands in kid-gloves, touching her naked body as
she stands in high heels, back to the front door
‘He never touches my soul’
Morning bird-song collapses into a mourning dirge,
She’s quavering under the piano, drinking Finlandia from the bottle,
He runs Beethoven’s Für Elise over the keys,
“You wretch! Why that piece!” she shouts,
“Equivocator! You said I was forgiven.”
The renowned portrait artist waits wrathfully,
beside his easel, for
his silly-rich subjects to settle
GORKY
Arshile Gorky
paints from
inside the Peculiar,
Triumphantly!
He paints the word
bravado without a say-so,
Trauma is spelt with
a flourish
registers as a B flat,
The titular character
in his oil-on-canvas novella
is pawned off,
You can see him mashed & draped
resembling a trampled
Chagall perpetrator
&
Maxim Gorky,
writing in the shadow
of the gulag,
‘To paint is to bear a child,
To write is to raise the child’
Once he bled Tolstoy blood
On Moscow snow,
Now there’s only blood in his eyes,
He looks up,
‘Is it a sign?’ says his muse,
‘I can’t see where it wants me to go’ says Alexei Maximovich,
The GORKYS,
Once were cousins,
But never again
Argotist Online Poetry is the successor to the poetry section of the now no longer existing The Argotist Online. Send submissions to argotistonline@gmail.com. Closing date for Submissions is 1 April 2025.
Poems by Joshua Martin
THREADED INTO A SAUCE Mourn spouse separate splints groaning glassy pelvic veneration stumps as thorough haze with chaotic underwater caving...
-
THE STUDIO The vista which then opened was one I never could’ve anticipated in the Nineties—the PAFA campus was set as a series of jeweled b...
-
EQUATIONS #25 When I converse with N on the phone, in about my thirteenth year, our heads open up together, and we create an imaginative lan...
-
EQUATIONS #26 Audrey, as a tangent to N, took the idea, not of broadcasting gossip but of sharing and disseminating literature, as a fait ac...